Lesions in the Landscape by UK/Danish artist Shona Illingworth, a Reader in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, is a powerful new multi-screen installation, exploring the impact of amnesia and the erasure of individual and cultural memory. Opening at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool on 18 September 2015, the work tours to Sydney Australia, the Outer Hebrides, Scotland and finally to London, where there will be an international symposium in October 2016.

Revealing the devastating effects of amnesia on one woman and the striking parallels with the sudden evacuation of the inhabitants of St. Kilda in the North Atlantic in 1930, Lesions in the Landscape examines the profound effect and wider implications of memory loss on identity, space and the capacity to imagine the future. The exhibition is produced by FACT and is supported by an Arts Award from the Wellcome Trust, with additional support from University of Kent. For more information click here: http://www.fact.co.uk/projects/lesions-in-the-landscape.aspx

In collaboration with neuropsychologists Martin A. Conway and Catherine Loveday, Shona Illingworth has worked with and filmed Claire, who, following a trauma to her brain can no longer remember most of her past, create new memories or recognise anyone – not even herself. However the new sensory operated camera technology worn around her neck can help reactivate access to some of her ‘forgotten’ memories, in rare bursts of intense recollection.

The sudden end to Claire’s access to her memories echoes the evacuation of the inhabitants of the remote Scottish archipelago of St. Kilda on 29 August 1930, ending over 2,000 years of continuous habitation. Both mark an abrupt and irreversible lesion in a cultural landscape. Accessing or reconstructing the past is a process fraught with difficulty and both share a sense of isolation.  They are both now the subject of scientific inquiry, St. Kilda as an outdoor laboratory for scientific investigation, a carefully preserved heritage site and a radar tracking station for complex military weapons testing, and Claire as the subject of a major neuropsychological study. And in each case, the past is continually constructed by others.

For the project, Shona took Claire to St. Kilda, where she filmed her in this intense landscape. The installation presents three video projections and an array of up to twenty loud speakers to create a fully immersive sound environment of voice, engineered and ambient sounds. They form a richly layered composition where the sounds of thousands of calling gannets is underscored by intermittent sounds of EEG signals which capture the desolate internal landscape of Claire’s amnesia as she struggles to search for her own memory of this environment.

An ongoing series of Amnesia Forums examine the politics of memory, amnesia and cultural erasure through discussion between invited artists, scientists, writers and researchers. This feeds directly into the Amnesia Museum, a growing body of works which map out the landscape of amnesia. It draws together film, photography, drawings and documents, and will be shown alongside the installation. Also included is a 32-speaker sonification of Claire’s EEG, as well as neuropsychological diagrams describing the impact of the lesion on her memory.

After premiering at FACT, Lesions in the Landscape will tour to the UNSW Galleries, Sydney, Australia, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Art Gallery, Outer Hebrides and finally to Dilston Grove & CGP Gallery in London. An accompanying book will be published in autumn 2016.

On 6 November, 8am – 5.30pm, Shona will be a guest speaker at the Human Futures Forum: The Unchained Horizon: a day of interdisciplinary discussions, exploring the impact of technologies upon the changing contemporary understandings of place at FACT in Liverpool. See link for further details:  http://www.fact.co.uk/whats-on/current/human-futures-forum-the-unchained-horizon.aspx

About Shona Illingworth

Born in Denmark in 1966, Shona Illingworth was brought up in the Highlands of Scotland. She trained at Goldsmith’s and is now based in London. She creates evocative video and sound installations that explore the experience of memory and the formation of identity in situations of social tension and trauma. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Bologna, the Wellcome Collection, London, the National Museum, Tirana and Interaccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Toronto, screened at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Modern Art Oxford and Museum of Fine Art Lausanne and she has received commissions from Film and Video Umbrella, the Hayward Gallery, London and Channel 4 Television.

About FACT

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) is the UK’s leading media arts centre, based in Liverpool and is focused on bringing people, art and technology together. FACT’s award-winning building houses three galleries, a café, bar and four cinema screens. Since the organisation was founded in 1988 (previously called Moviola), it has commissioned and presented over 250 new media and digital artworks from artists including Pipilotti Rist, Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Isaac Julien.

Opening hours: “Tuesday – Sunday 11am – 6pm”
Tickets: Free entry
Address: FACT, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L1 4DQ
Phone: +44(0) 151 707 4444
Website: www.fact.co.uk    Twitter: @FACT_Liverpool

Previously featured in The Guardian as their Exhibition of the Week, Great Expectations, by international artist, Adam Chodzko, will be at the Guildhall Museum, Rochester High Street, until September 11th. Whitstable based Chodzko, whose work is exhibited extensively, and who was recently shortlisted for the prestigious Jarman Award, lectures at the School of Music and Fine Art. (Find out more here: https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/news.html?view=1486 )

The work was inspired by a series of enigmas surrounding the world’s most complete collection of 18th century tools. Revered by trade researchers and historians, the Seaton Tool Chest is considered by curators to be one of the Guildhall Museum’s most important artefacts. The large wooden cabinet houses the 200 tools that were a gift from cabinetmaker Joseph Seaton to his son Benjamin in 1796, who used the tools to make a beautiful cabinet to store them in, but never used them again. For artist Chodzko, this is the perfect symbol of acceptance and rejection between child and parent. His response, Great Expectations, re-imagines the chest as a conceptual art object transformed into a virtual entity or spaceship in a revolution instigated by the tools, weaving together past, present and future in a video (combining animation and documentary) and sculpture.

Now living in digital form, the tools narrate their history, a story of familial, social and cosmic joinery. They also claim to have made Ark Eye, a wooden sculptural object that has crash-landed from their digital universe into ours, to become a sci-fi museum curiosity.

Over a 6 month period, the work has also appeared in a DIY store, on a massive screen overlooking a busy bus station and car park, in the home of a traditional sign-writer, and within a school community, connecting public spaces in the Medway towns of Gillingham, Rochester and Chatham with the private interiors of home and school.

Great Expectations is the final commission in Hoodwink’s three-year programme of site-specific projects in the everyday places of Kent and can be experienced at The Guildhall Museum, Rochester, which is open 10am to 5pm, Tuesdays to Sundays, plus Mondays during the summer holidays from 27 July to 31 August. Tel 01634 332900 or email: guildhall.museum@medway.gov.uk

Further Links:

http://www.adamchodzko.com/

https://vimeo.com/118989449

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2015/feb/13/love-stories-lionel-messi-mingering-mike-week-in-art

http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art518917-adam-chodzko-sends-artworks-to-b-and-q-a-pumping-station-and-the-guildhall-museum-in-kent

Public House, a new feature length film for cinema by award winning artist and academic, Sarah Turner, Director of Research in the School of Music and Fine Art, explores the centrality of pubs and social spaces to communal narrative and memory and takes participatory documentary to a whole new level.

Sarah lives near the pub in London SE15, and has been documenting key moments of the community take over since April 2012. Then, the pub’s staff were given a few days notice of eviction and closure; the cherished Ivy House had been sold for conversion into flats. However, the community ensured the sale was blocked through an English Heritage listing, the pub was registered as the first Asset of Community Value in the UK, then purchased and re-opened in August 2013 as a community pub, hosting events as diverse as folk music, swing classes, knitting circles, big band Sunday roasts and samba workshops for pre-schoolers. The film mirrors this cultural transformation in a movement through documentary events, to forms of community participation that are rooted in pub culture – in this case, spoken word and performance poetry – to a minimalist opera that is composed of ambient sound and the collective voice.

Sarah, an artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and academic, whose feature films have been broadcast on Channel 4 and who has had scripts commissioned by the BFI, Film Four Lab and Zephyr Films, is now editing the footage, which offers an alternative portrait of Peckham Rye. Public House is funded by a production award from Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), a research award from the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent and is supported by Arts Council England. For more information go to: http://thepublichousefilm.wix.com/home

Sarah is giving a talk about the work and its progress on July 8th, which includes a screening of her moving image work and an exclusive preview of the first act of Public House, followed by a discussion with Rebecca Shatwell, Director of AV Festival, addressing the concepts and approaches involved in her practice.  For details go to: http://northernmedia.org/events/sarah-turner-screening-and-q-a-with-rebecca-shatwell

Adam Chodzko is an artist and senior lecturer in Fine Art  at the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent. His work, Ghost, was selected for Sculpture in the City, an annual public art exhibition in the City of London, in which contemporary art pieces are placed in and around the Square Mile from 9th of July 2015 – May 2016. The Sculpture in the City art exhibition is a unique collaboration between the City of London Corporation, local businesses, and the art world, providing the opportunity for new audiences to engage with established and emerging contemporary artists, including works from internationally renowned artists Damien Hirst, Sigalit Landau and Bruce Beasley.

Adam Chodzko’s, Ghost is a kayak, a sculpture as vessel, a coffin, a costume and a camera rig. He designed the kayak to have a paddler in the back and a passenger – a member of the public in the front. The passenger is reclined, stretched out like a body in a coffin, with their head slightly raised. They occupy the horizontal interface between sky and water in an attempt to experience a state between sleep and wake, living and dying. A dome in the deck of the kayak also separates them physically and visually from the paddler at the back. Through each journey for Ghost, the artist and the passenger are on a metaphorical and mythological journey to the Island of the Dead. A camera, mounted on the bows, records the journey of each passenger, thus creating an archive of their experience. No two journeys are the same.

This year a total of fifteen works are set to transform the EC3 insurance area. The Historic Leadenhall Market will again be used as a dramatic backdrop, when Adam Chodzko’s Ghost, a 22 foot wooden kayak, is suspended from the ceiling of the ornate Victorian structure.

Chodzko’s art works  has been  exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions including: Tate, St Ives; Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (MAMBo); Istanbul Biennale, Venice Biennale; Deste Foundation, Athens; PS1, New York; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. His work focuses on the relational politics of culture’s edges, endings, displacements, transitions and disappearances through provocatively looking in the ‘wrong’ places” – a search for knowledge through instability. Chodzko operates in the tight, poetic spaces between documentary and fantasy, conceptualism and surrealism, public and private space, often engaging reflexively and directly with the role of the viewer.

Complementary educational workshops, run by Open-City, will inspire schoolchildren from the local area before and after the project installation.

For more info go to: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/sculptureinthecity